December 2020 involved a couple of major events related to our hardware security research — a HOST Tutorial and a CASA Distinguished Lecture. Ryan and Dr. Nicole Fern from Tortuga Logic gave a tutorial at IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) HOST 2020. Ryan was also invited to give a Distinguished Lecture in the CASA Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr University Bochum. Both events focused on our work on Property Driven Hardware Security.

Property driven hardware security is a design methodology to assess the safety and security of hardware designs. It enables security experts to describe how the hardware should (or should not) function. These security properties are formally specified using languages that map to models that are easy to verify using existing design tools. There are three fundamental elements for any hardware security design flow. First, security experts need expressive languages to specify these security properties. Second, these properties should map to models to describe the security related behavior of a hardware design. Finally, hardware security design tools verify that the hardware design meets these properties using formal solvers, simulation, and emulation.

The HOST tutorial was one of six selected to provide HOST attendees with an in-depth look at important topics in hardware security. I gave a similar tutorial in the last HOST that was well-received and invited back for another year. This time around, the tutorial included Dr. Nicole Fern from Tortuga Logic. Nicole provided a great presentation on the types of properties that modern hardware security verification tools can handle. I added an in-depth look about how these tools can verify security properties. Have a look yourself at the materials made available to the attendees if you would like.

The Distinguished Lecture was a great honor for me. I really admire the research done in CASA Cluster of Excellence — they have an outstanding group of researchers that I have followed for many years (even decades). This invitation did lead me to consider what one needs to do in order to be eligible to give a distinguished lecture. My conclusion is that one mostly just needs to be a researcher for a long enough time and then their work becomes distinguished. And that made me feel a bit old. So before my talk I made sure to shave and pluck out grey hairs. The folks at CASA did a nice job of producing a video of the talk: